Are Prisons Obsolete? (Open Media Series)

by Angela Y. Davis

Hornblum’s book, Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison, highlights the career of research dermatologist Albert Kligman, who was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Kligman, the “Father of RetinA,” 105 conducted hundreds of experiments on the men housed in Holmesburg Prison and, in the process, trained many researchers to use what were later recognized as unethical research methods. When Dr. Kligman entered the aging prison he was awed by the potential it held for his research. In 1966, he recalled in a newspaper interview: “All I saw before me were acres of skin. It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time.” The hundreds of inmates walking aimlessly before him represented a unique opportunity for unlimited and undisturbed medical research. He described it in this interview as “an anthropoid colony, mainly healthy” under perfect control conditions.106 By the time the experimentation program was shut down in 1974 and new federal regulations prohibited the use of prisoners as subjects for academic and corporate research, numerous cosmetics and skin creams had already been tested. Some of them had caused great harm to these subjects and could not be marketed in their original form. Johnson and Johnson, Ortho Pharmaceutical, and Dow Chemical are only a few of the corporations that reaped great material benefits from these experiments.